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BOINC Projects to Help Health Science and SETI Projects

BOINC can use the idle time on your computer (when the screen-saver is running) to help cure diseases such as HIV, Parkinson's, arthritis, and breast cancer, study global warming, help SETI search for life on other planets, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research safely, securely, and easily.

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These problems are still too large even for a supercomputer, but doesn’t mean the problems can’t be figured out. This is where you come in.

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a project developed by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley (http://berkeley.edu/) that lets you donate your idle computer time to science projects like SETI@home, Climateprediction.net, Rosetta@home, World Community Grid, and many others. This home/office/work network of millions of volunteer computers from around the world running BOINC projects creates resources larger than any currently existing supercomputer. Computations that would take tens of thousands of years to compute on an ordinary computer are processed in just a few months with the aid of joint computers.

The BOINC project, which was originally developed to manage the SETI@home project, has helped numerous scientists solve problems that would have taken years to figure out. Currently some 54 Publications by BOINC projects have been made possible by the work of volunteer computing projects.

Once BOINC is downloaded to your computer, (download link below), you can join one or more BOINC projects that need your computers assistance to analyze data in it's "idle" time. BOINC consists of a server system and client software that communicate with each other to distribute, process, and return workunits.

1/ A "packet" of data is sent to your computer

2/ Your computer analyzes the data packet

3/ The data is then sent back to the project you are participating in.

As of today, Sep 16 2009, BOINC shows 331,372 active volunteers with BOINC running on 570,547 computers around the world!

BOINC Projects you can Assist Include:

BOINC Space and Astronomy Projects:

Screen-shot of SETI@home running on the Disabled World main "Chateau" server.

Cosmology@Home - With this BOINC project you can help search for the model that best describes our Universe and to find the range of models that agree with the available astronomical and particle physics data.

Einstein@Home - A BOINC project that searches through data collected by gravitational wave detectors for evidence of periodic sources (such as spinning neutron stars), gravitational equivalent of pulsars.

Orbit@Home - Study Solar System dynamics focusing on Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) research specifically NEA seaarch strategies and NEA impact hazard monitoring.

MilkyWay@Home - A worthwhile BOINC project that aids research in modeling and determining the evolution of the Milkyway galaxy.

BOINC Health and Medical Projects:

Rosetta@home - Help determine 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases.

Malariacontrol.net - The malariacontrol.net project is a BOINC project that makes use of network computing for stochastic modelling of the clinical epidemiology and natural history of Plasmodium falciparum malaria.

Docking@Home - A BOINC project which uses Internet connected computers to perform scientific calculations that aid in the creation of new and improved medicines. The project aims to help cure diseases such as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

Superlink@Technion - Help geneticists all over the world find disease-provoking genes causing some types of diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), cancer, schizophrenia and many others.

BOINC Science Projects:

Hydrogen@Home - Help enhance clean energy technology by improving hydrogen production and storage.

LHC@home - This BOINC project studies the stability of the orbits of particles traveling around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator built at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC will be the most powerful instrument ever built to investigate the properties of sub-atomic particles.

Climateprediction.net - A computing BOINC project to produce predictions of the Earth's climate up to 2080 and to test the accuracy of climate models. They need people around the world to give time on their computers when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity.

Other BOINC Projects:

View the full list of Current BOINC Projects for further information and projects you can assist with.

Disabled World encourages BOINC volunteers to support projects that make major scientific and health related contributions.

For more information, and to download BOINC for free, visit http://boinc.berkeley.edu/. After installing BOINC on your computer, you can connect it to as many of these BOINC projects as you like.

Watch a short video clip presentation on the BOINC Project (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) for an interesting insight into how it works. You can also view a video of the SETI@home project running on a home computer.

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